One of my Fuel workstations was reporting over 4,000* days uptime (as per the uptime command) a while ago. Unfortunately there was a power hiccup (possibly a double-hiccup) at work the weekend before last and it couldn't hold on.

*OK, the 4,000 isn't quite accurate. The previous time it booted, it had a very wrong - as in several years wrong - date that was corrected while it was running. System then thought that it had been running since the date it had before time correction all the way through. Indeed, I have not even been at my current job for 4,000 days, and I have no reason to believe that Fuel has been where it is that long either.

lparsons wrote:*OK, the 4,000 isn't quite accurate. The previous time it booted, it had a very wrong - as in several years wrong - date that was corrected while it was running. System then thought that it had been running since the date it had before time correction all the way through. Indeed, I have not even been at my current job for 4,000 days, and I have no reason to believe that Fuel has been where it is that long either.

lparsons wrote:*OK, the 4,000 isn't quite accurate. The previous time it booted, it had a very wrong - as in several years wrong - date that was corrected while it was running. System then thought that it had been running since the date it had before time correction all the way through. Indeed, I have not even been at my current job for 4,000 days, and I have no reason to believe that Fuel has been where it is that long either.

The Fuel wasn't even shipping 4,000 days ago!

I couldn't help but wonder that when I was seeing the number. I think it was somewhere around 4,400 - but of course I can't tell anymore since the system was rebooted by the power outage.

I does leave me to wonder how when it had previously booted, it came up with a date that was not only wrong, but it predated the system itself. But yet it didn't go back to the dawn of the Unix epoch, either; I wonder if it defaulted to the release date of the version of IRIX that was installed (system shows 6.5 IP35)?

lparsons wrote:I wonder if it defaulted to the release date of the version of IRIX that was installed (system shows 6.5 IP35)?

The release date of the version of IRIX that was installed shouldn't predate the release of Fuel hardware by very much (and depending on the number of updates installed, could be well after the release of the Fuel).

lparsons wrote:Updates? You mean you can update IRIX? Nah, we don't do that around here ...

Ok, but even then, the first IRIX release that included hardware support for the Fuel was 6.5.17, released in August 2002, which is still shy of 4000+ days.

I can't rule out that I am looking in the wrong place to find the version of IRIX running on this system; but when I log in it tells me it is running 6.5 IP35. I am not the original admin of these systems, so I don't know exactly how they were set up - for that matter I don't even know where all the system discs are.

The initial release of IRIX 6.5 was August of 1998, which would come closer to being 4000 days old.....

If I were to kidnap an SGI and take it home, I would definitely install nekoware on it (that isn't out of the question in the future, though my wife would likely be less-than-pleased). For right now I'm the only user of our SGIs >90% of the time so I won't be setting up nekoware at the moment.

lparsons wrote:For right now I'm the only user of our SGIs >90% of the time so I won't be setting up nekoware at the moment.

If you can answer, what are all those SGIs being used for? Be as vague or specific as you like or can be. I'm just curious - I like to know what they're being used for at those sites where they're still in production.

lparsons wrote:For right now I'm the only user of our SGIs >90% of the time so I won't be setting up nekoware at the moment.

If you can answer, what are all those SGIs being used for? Be as vague or specific as you like or can be. I'm just curious - I like to know what they're being used for at those sites where they're still in production.

Thanks!

I'll give the short, politically-correctified version of the flock and it's status here. If you're curious beyond what I state here drop me a PM and I can fill you in on more gory details.

Basically, the SGIs that we have - the whole collection of icons in my sig - were all acquired for doing structural biology and molecular modelling. Back in 2004 or so when we last cut a check to SGI (for the Fuels and the half-rack Altix) that was the way to go. Now the only one in that cast that is powered up as of this afternoon is one Fuel (the subject of this thread, as it happens) which is our NIS master. Of course, as my personal workstation is the only NIS client that cares, I guess it is rather silly to keep it running right now.

On a semi-tangential note, in the discussion on the icons I had suggested that it would be neat to be able to place the icons upside-down to indicate disabled systems. If I were able to do that, over half the icons would be inverted in my current situation (including the tall rack Altix through none of its own fault).

So August 1998 would be more like 4,800 days, and August 2002 just over 3300.

As an aside, the Indigo2 had a "date" command in PROM monitor to read and set the system date/time (which was handy as the clock woke up from cold in 1993), but the Fuel does not. Was it removed for a more specific reason than making room for other code?

lparsons wrote:Basically, the SGIs that we have - the whole collection of icons in my sig - were all acquired for doing structural biology and molecular modelling. Back in 2004 or so when we last cut a check to SGI (for the Fuels and the half-rack Altix) that was the way to go. Now the only one in that cast that is powered up as of this afternoon is one Fuel (the subject of this thread, as it happens) which is our NIS master.

Thanks for sharing that. It's just interesting (to me at least) to see what prompted the selection of SGI then, and speculate as to where things went beyond what they were offering in the meantime.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress...